The wall between SAP and generative AI

SAP systems hold enormous amounts of business data. Combining them with generative AI promises a step-change in productivity, yet many companies hit a wall: confidential data cannot be sent to external cloud AI services.

Why local LLMs?

The biggest benefit is that data never leaves your environment. You keep full control over logs, costs are predictable, and offline or restricted environments are supported.

Practical use cases

Knowledge search and Q&A: retrieve answers from manuals and incident procedures using RAG
Incident support: match error messages with past incidents to suggest causes and next steps
Code generation and review: ABAP skeletons and code explanation
Report summarization: draft summaries of monthly figures for management

A 4-step adoption roadmap

Requirements — clarify processes, users, accuracy, and budget
Technical validation — compare candidate models
PoC — validate with real data
Production — deploy with operations, monitoring, and retraining

Points to design in from day one

Mitigations for hallucinated answers and grounded responses
Balance between model size and hardware cost
Access control and audit logging for SAP data

Summary

The value of SAP × AI is using accumulated business data and field knowledge safely, quickly, and effectively. Local LLMs are a realistic way to get there.